When we moved into our house there was this batty old woman across the street. She wasn’t mean but her daughter, who was in her late 50s was a piece of work.

We had company over so I parked across the street from our driveway one weekend. Daughter Dearest happened to be out for her monthly keeping-my-name-in-the-will vistit and took it upon herself to confront me on parking on the street in front of her mother’s house.

I would have just apologized and moved the car but she seemed to really want to guilt me into submission so she laid it on pretty think. Then she topped it with a cherry: she is blind, you know .

At that point I had no choice but to be rude. Then why does she care if I park there?

The daughter got angry but tried to win this battle. She gave me a littany of reasons all of which I shot down. The worst was this story about how people who picked her mother up needed to park there. THE WOMAN HAD TWO DRIVEWAYS!!!

Finally she muttered something about city codes and not parking on the street. I reminded her that we were in the City of Columbus and no such code existed.

We live next door to two coffin-dodgers that have coveted a parking space for the past four years.

Last year when my wife was heavily preganant and struggling to walk any distance greater than from our house to the car parked outside they decided to park there instead. They kept this up for a few months and have now returned to the original space.

Of course I chose not to superglue a PAN to their car but have chalked it up with all the other shit you don’t expect to endure from two people in their 70′s.

My aunts and uncles made an unannounced visit and stayed a couple days at the parents’ house. The directly accross the street neighbors literally drive around and pick out code violations on all the houses in the subdivision then report people, so they apparently took it upon themselves to notify the police that a car had been parked, omg and this his so terrible, on the street…OVERNIGHT! I don’t much care for my relatives and my uncle is a pedophile so personally I thought it was funny, but my family was not amused.

I think the commuter needs to customize the Camry with some 20″ rims, ghetto-fied graphics and some tinted windows. Then you tweak the alarm so it blasts DMX rapping about losing his mind when ever anybody thinks about looking at the car. Those cappucino-frothing house fraus would cower in fear if they thought an OG was chillin in their hood.

Heh, honestly, if I saw that, I’d make sure that they got cited for it because a) putting shit that isn’t an automobile in the street is illegal and b) they’re entitled jackasses and probably deserve worse than a citation. But I don’t have enough time to go to jail.

What I love is that they have no logical reason to do that. They have a fairly sizeable driveway, so they don’t need to save it for themselves. I never saw them move it for other cars, so they’re not saving it for someone else (besides, people like that don’t have friends), and if they think someone parking in front of their house is ugly, then clearly trash bins and cones are much more aethetically pleasing.

p.s. if i ever walked by their house, I kicked the cones over. Fight PA with PA!

They do this in Brooklyn, too. I have a collection of cones that I keep in my back seat from parking in spots that “belong” to these people.

Sure, there may have been another spot on the street, but:
a) the guy’s an asshole for trying to get around the “no one can find a spot in brooklyn” thing
and
b) he left the cone in the street. it can be considered garbage at that point. call me a “freegan”.

I have done the “nice” thing when people leave their garbage pails in the street: I put them on the curb where they belong before I park. Sometimes I put it on their porch. Sometimes, if I’m in a hurry, I’ll just run it over.

I’ve gotta hand it to one guy for his creativity though – he has a movable fire hydrant that he keeps in front of his house. I park there all the time, but that’s because I want to get a ticket and actually win for once.

I love how the note starts out with decent penmanship and is reasonable, although blunt. Then as the meds wear off and the note descends into lunacy, the writing gets BIGGER and LOOPIER, illustrating just how crazy this chiquita is for giving a shit about people parking on a street! In the city! Heaven forbid!

I think the person who wrote this is just trying to seem crazy. Notice the signing with “Resident(s)”. He or she is obviously trying to give the impression of not knowing whether he/she is one person or several people. Everyone knows that the multiple personality crap isn’t a real diagnosis, but something filmmakers came up with to be able to tie insane plots together at the end.

This note looks exactly like a note that will be written by Cody in 20 years. After her husband, Chip, leaves her for his secretary, she will strapped for cash and forced to write on fewer sheets of paper, forcing her handwriting to become smaller in size. The bitterness and entitlement, however, remain.

Parking rules are really kind of interesting to me. In my hometown (population 80,000), if you park on the street in front of someone’s house it should be with good reason. My parents find it “strange” when someone parks in front of our house on the street.

Here in SF you’re goddamn lucky if you find street parking anywhere near your place. You wouldn’t find as much of this bitchery here, though I do confess to getting pissed off at the neighbor who owns a business called the “Chinese Relaxation Tour.” They park their “Relaxation Bus” on the street all the time and it takes up almost three spots. I keep wanting to leave them a rude note but that would be so unfair…

In our neighborhood (a suburb), you need to ask permission before you park in somebody’s lawn (if, say, you’re having many guests over and the abundance of cars can’t fit in your parking area). But if it’s a regular public street, I don’t know if you have the right to “claim” your spot in the name of Spain or anything. o_<

I used to live in the hills of Oakland, California. A real b#@*h of a woman (and family) lived next door. Yes, parking was tight but everyone else understood that they didn’t own the street and accepted the situation graciously.

She didn’t. If you, or a visitor, DARED to park in front of HER house, she would send her little weenie boy schlub of a husband over to whine until you moved your car.

At the same time she was running an business out of her home illegally with no city permit or approval and she had no problem with her employees and workers parking all day long in front of other people’s homes.

It made no sense to me, or to anyone else in the neighborhood, but it was usually easier to give in than argue with her or her emasculated excuse for a spouse.

Her home burned to the ground in the Oakland Hills firestorm of 1991. It was the only home that burned on our street.

This may sound terrible, but most of the neighbors felt as though she finally got what she deserved.

There was a woman who lived at the end corner of our small cul de sac. She was an older, Greek (I SWEAR TO GOD) woman, and she had a fire hydrant smack in front of her house. At first, she would paint the entire curb red, from one end of her house, all the way around the corner to the end of the side of her house. She had a camera she kept ready (you could see the little green light – this was the 90′s, no digital yet) in the windowsill of her home. She would take pictures of people walking by, parking their cars, and God Forbid the next door neighb or the people across the way had a party… she would be calling the PD all night!

Well, neighbors complained (once she got put on probation for spraying her next door neighb, a really cool dude named Joe, with the hose) and she was told she couldn’t paint the curb anymore, except where the hydrant was.

She also had painted her entire driveway a weird brick red, and erected a makeshift “fence” about 1 1/2 ft high to block off anyone from pulling into her driveway (presumably to turn around once they realized they turned into a court)…

Once my mom and I were in the car arguing, so she stopped along the side of the house on the side of the road to concentrate on yelling at me, and Mrs. Duvalis (sp?) came running out yelling that we couldn’t park there and she had a permit (she always said that) and we had to leave… my mother was already irritated, just looked at her (with The Look) and yelled “FUCK YOU” as she flipped her the bird. One of my cooler moments with mom as a teen.

I tortured her to no end, it was fun. She would call the cops EVERY SINGLE TIME we would even hang out by the hydrant, waiting for a friend’s mom to come get him… they would show up, chat with us for a minute, go inside and talk to her, and leave. Apparently Sunnyvale P.D. has a drawer FULL of pictures from her over the years. All the cops around here know her.

She also hit me and another little girl who lived across the street from her… I attacked her but the little girl’s family just pressed charges. I guess she died though in the last few years, cause I went by about a month ago and the driveway fence was gone, and the paint had disappeared.

…at the end all she had left were a bunch of blurry pictures,a fuzzy memory and the little kid she actually caught and tied up in the basement. By then he was nothing but bones….oh ya, she had a whole room full of old yellowed police reports.

I got a note like this once during college… the dorm parking lot did not have enough space so a lot of us had to park along the street. A person who owned one of the houses along the street put a note on my car talking about how they had friends that wanted to park in front of the house, etc. I wish I had saved that note…. It blew me away that they felt like they had to be rude. A nice note would have accomplished the same thing and NOT ruined my day.

The commenter who mentioned someone with a fence in front of their driveway reminded me of my parents’ next door neighbor. Every year there’s a neighborhood-wide garage sale and every year that neighbor puts those saw horse things in front of his driveway so people don’t use it to turn around, or whatever. I’ve seen him trying to wash tire marks off of it too… that’s what happens on a driveway, you just gotta deal with it…

That is definitely the handwriting of an elderly woman. Is that what happens when you get old? You have nothing better to do with your time so you start inventing things to write passive-aggressive notes about?

I have often parked on this street before,
But I never got a note that wasn’t sweet before.
‘Though a parking pass costs as much as gas,
I won’t park on the street where you live.
Are there parking lots in the heart of town?
Off to work I trot, down in another part of town.
Will the children play ‘neath my Chevrolet?
No, that’s just on the street where you live.
And, oh! The towering feeling
When construction workers are near;
The overpowering feeling
Another nasty note may suddenly appear!
People stop and stare; they don;t bother me.
For I know it’s just the handicapped and alderly.
I’ll go park and ride, I’ll be damned if I’d
Park again on the street where you live!

A child? No, they’d be writing in crayon and block capitals. Construction worker? Again, crayons. Elderly, maybe blame Parkinsons for the handwriting. Handicapped, well, any number of defects. Did I say defects? Sorry, I meant defects.

Defects? I mean, defects. Jesus, how are you supposed to put this politely? I can’t. I’m sorry. Defects.

WOW! I think that note is from MY neighbors, Larry and John. They, too, leave angry notes on otherwise-legally parked cars. I have saved them all in a file at my home, an act which I recognize is also passive aggressive.
_Dani in MA.

Where I live “they” (the powers that be) made “owning the street” a form of art. Most streets are designated as Residential Parking Only. This would be all fair and good if the houses on the streets didn’t have garages AND drive-ways where you can easily fit at least 2 cars in. What Residential Parking Only includes is that the residents can call a commissionaire who will “trott out” to their humble million dollar houses and issue $50-75 to the offenders. I work at a hospital for the elderly with a ridiculously low income, so I cannot afford to pay for parking at the hospital (another thing, WHY should people pay for parking at hospitals? I am sure nothing is more heart-warming then coming out after seeing your loved one in a hospital to find a ticket or more on your car). Anyway, so I would park on the adjacent street and not once but twice someone called the commissionaire on me on a Saturday morning. Don’t these people have better things to do with their times than make phone calls so people can be ticketed? And anyway, what do they care who parks on a street that they have absolutely NO legal or other kinds of claim to.

The worst of it is that my apartment is on a street that people park on ALL the time for work so if I happen to be home between the hours of 9 am-5pm have to park several streets away.

Parking in most parts of that neighborhood can be hellacious. I know, I live there. It’s a well-known trick to park in a more out-of-the-way street (like 16th Ave.) to avoid driving in circles looking for a parking spot. It’s funny; the few times I’ve done that myself, I was slightly concerned that some resident would lose their shit over it.

Oh, and it should be mentioned that many/most houses on Capitol Hill don’t have private driveways.

I had a neighbor who suffered from the same untimely condition. I call it untimely because we never know when it will strike, but nobody wants nor needs it. I came to understand it as loneliness and confusion. It causes people to strike out at others in an attempt to say, ” hey, I’m over here and I really don’t like my life and I have no one to turn to.” It would have been easy to strike back at the rudeness of her note about my parking in front of her house, but I felt something telling me to look closer at the situation. I knocked on her door and when she answered I introduced myself as the person belonging to the car in front of her house and asked if I could visit with her. At first she was very defensive and guarded. I smiled and appologized for causing her any discomfort or inconvenience and explained why I had parked there and told her I would not park there in the future. I guess my smile and lack of aggression set her at ease because her shoulders relaxed and her eyebrows returned to a normal position on her face. It was at this point that I asked her her name. Since I had already told her my name, it was only fair that she tell me hers. She did, and in a very short time, Irene and I were chatting about everything from the weather to favorite foods. Irene wasn’t a mean person at all but she was lonely and confused. The loneliness part is easy to understand but the confused part is not. Being lonely and being alone are not the same thing. For Irene, the lack of close friends and the lack of self love had created the loneliness condition that drove her to striking out at whoever parked in front of her house. That was the closest person she could contact for help…….. only her cries for help were abusive to most people. What I learned from this is that this person’s issue wasn’t someone parking in front of her house but rather someone parking in front of her house that wasn’t coming to see her. I guess if I was Irene’s age, alone, most of my friends already in the cemetary, I would probably do the same thing. She was trying to make contact with another life form……that was all. Anyhow, I still park my car in front of Irene’s house from time to time because, A. she invited me to and B. because the notes now invite me to share a beverage and some home made cookies when I return.

I doubt if all encounters would have turned out as mine did, but we’ll never know if we don’t try. It’s so easy to see everyone who confronts us as an obsticle rather than an opportunity to grow. Here’s to growing!

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"The thing that drives me bonkers at work is to open up the trash can drawer and see a cup half-full of water that was carefully placed into the trash can so it doesn't spill--in a trash can an arm's length away from the kitchen sink!

99% of the people in my office are college graduates, probably toward the top of their class. But some without enough common sense to pour the water in the sink before putting the cup into the trash can.